A Piece of Canada's Past

History buffs say Pickering site was home to a big Seneca village but officials won't acknowledge it.

Jerry Amernic
Special To The Star

Elizabeth Shumovich remembers when her husband was ploughing their garden in 1968 and found a cannonball. They had just bought a property east of the Rouge River in Pickering. He found it in the soil at the back of the lot. It was about the size of a small potato. Rusty, weat herbeaten and heavy.

She says her husband grew up in south Pickering and told her about the old Indian village at the mouth of the Rouge. Over the years they found other things - flint and arrowheads - but the "Shumovich cannonball," as the locals call it, was the prize catch.
Local resident Marian Martin, a real estate agent who spends her spare time dabbling in history, thinks she knows how it got there. She says there was an old Seneca village at the mouth of the Rouge, on the hill over looking the east bank. It was an ideal spot, with open access to Lake Ontario, a navigable river that led north to Lake Simcoe (making it a prime fur-trading route) and high ground that was a natural fortification.

The village, Martin says, was a thriving community with longhouses and acres of cornfields. It was called Ganatsekwyagon, and in the late 1600s , was home to many Seneca.

The Seneca were the most numerous of the Six Nations of the Iroquois, and Lake Ontario was ringed with their villages. But in the summer of 1687, the French, trying to gain a foothold in the fur trade, razed all those villages in one swoop. They had guns. And cannonballs.

New York state has preserved an old Seneca village near Rochester. The Ganondagan State Historic Site was formally dedicated on July 14, 1987, which, according to the museum there, was 300 years to the day after the governor-general of New France destroyed the village. New York also recognizes another Seneca village, Gandagora, as a historic site.

Ganatsekwyagon? In Canada there is no official recognition.

Enter www.blackhole.ca. If ever there was a Web site prepared for battle, it's this one, run by Martin. She has spent years doing research and has found maps. The 1656 Samson map has the village. So do the 1670 Galinee map, 1673 Jolliet map and 1688 Ruffeix map. She also found a 1793 sketch from David Smith, first surveyor general of Upper Canada, with the words "old Indian field" written east of the river.

And she unearthed an 1885 account of the village from historian C. Blackett Robinson, and a reference in a 1933 book, Toronto During The French Regime, by Percy Robinson.

Martin says Ganatsekwyagon was one of the first recorded residences of white men in the Toronto area - missionaries who arrived in 1668. It had the first school and was the first trading centre.

"Ontario has no legislation to protect important historic sites from development," Martin says. "By world heritage standards, the Ontario Heritage Act is badly obsolete."

Lionel Purcell, 82, is president of the Scarborough Historical Society. He recalls being given Indian artifacts in the 1940s by Gerald Cowan, whose farm was just east of the Rouge River.

"I don't have any question about that village," says Purcell.

He says the Rouge and Humber were the only rivers in the Toronto area that went north to Lake Simcoe. Another Seneca village called Teiaiagon, which was at the mouth of the Humber, is recognized.

David Redwolf says he is descended from Mohawk leader Joseph Brant (1742-1807) and Seneca Chief Red Jacket (1758-1830) and can trace his roots to Teiaiagon. He says Ganat sekwyagon was the largest Seneca village in Canada and may have been home to up to 3,300 people.

What's more, he says that when the French burned the villages, a fire-storm swept through what is now mainland Toronto and for the next 50 years, the area was a "no-man's land." He says this explains why trees on the Toronto Islands are larger than those on the mainland.

"Ganatsekwyagon is a focal point of Canadian history," Redwolf says. "There is no doubt about the village."
He speaks of " the total desecration" of his people and their land, and says Ganatsekwyagon is historically important not only to the First Nations, but to all Canadians.

At least some of the area that Martin, Redwolf and others claim to be the site of Ganatsekwyagon is on land owned by the Toronto Region Conservation Authority.

In 1988, it produced an archeological survey that mentions a Seneca site called Bead Hill upstream from the mouth of the Rouge. Bead Hill was later designated by Canada's National Historic Sites and Monuments Act.

"The survey involved test pits and no substantial number of artifacts was found at the mouth of the Rouge," notes Malcolm Horne, a heritage planner with the Ontario Ministry of Culture. "We have to go on physical evidence and there were no artifacts tying anything there to post-1550."

But Redwolf says Ganatsek wyagon means "the place where the cliff splits." He says that clearly refers to the bluffs on Lake Ontario. He also believes a burial ground was nearby.
A spokesperson with the province's Native Affairs Secretariat says she has never heard of Ganatsekwyagon.

Calls to the conservation authority resulted in an interview with a staff archeologist who says he has no experience with the Rouge River site.

Not to be denied , Martin pulls out a copy of the 1-5 Conceptual Plan, South Rosebank Area, prepared by the Metropolitan Toronto and Region Waterfront Plan. (That makes it a conservation authority document.) Page four refers to "the historic importance of the Rouge River mouth as the site of a major Indian settlement - Ganatsekwyagon."

Martin smirks with satisfaction.

"Ganatsekwyagon has been waiting for centuries to be recognized," she says. "To the day I die, I'll be convinced it was here."